Sunset Blvd.

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Many musicals have been rethought lately for reasons ranging from refreshing them for new audiences to demonstrating the egos and cleverness of their directors.

Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd was turned into an artful marching band; his Company was opened up with a gender switch; and The Color Purple became a festival of hanging chairs. The artfully stripped down New York City Center Encores! production of Chicago, sleek as a cougar, has been running for decades.

Now, director Jamie Lloyd has taken the clunky—but entertaining—Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Blvd. (1993) and stripped it of all realistic scenery—and a few songs—hoping to get to the nitty-gritty of its Hollywood characters and period with enormous projections which suggest a silent film.

The results are decidedly mixed mostly due to a failure to settle on a tone plus some head-scratching additions that have nothing to do with the story. Lloyd, most recently represented by his dreary, stripped-down A Doll’s House and an equally spare production of Pinter’s Betrayal, has shepherded this production with a combination of brilliance and self-indulgence.

Nicole Scherzinger, of Pussycat Dolls fame and a veteran of a number of musicals in London’s West End, is the new Norma Desmond, the latest in a starry lineup that has included Glenn Close, Patti LuPone, Betty Buckley and Elaine Paige.  She has some remarkable moments, fueled by an enthusiastic—even ecstatic—audience, but, sadly, is undercut by her director Jamie Lloyd’s confusing production.

The show’s scenario is based on Billy Wilder’s sardonic 1950 film as adapted by Don Black and Christopher Hampton who also wrote the lyrics to Lloyd Webber’s semi-operatic score. Wilder knew how to balance the camp with the drama.  Lloyd doesn’t, throwing all sorts of campy shtick to distract from the overblown and familiar storyline.

The plot of Sunset Blvd. follows the 1950 Billy Wilder film pretty faithfully.  It’s 1949 and down-on-his-luck writer Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) begs a film studio executive for an advance to avoid having his car repossessed.  He meets Betty Schaefer (Grace Hodgett Young), a script reader who wants Joe to expand on one of his short stories and turn it into a film script.

Joe escapes the guys chasing him, zipping into the driveway of an old mansion on Sunset Boulevard where is assumed to be an undertaker for the late monkey belonging to silent movie star, Norma Desmond. She lives alone in this large mansion with her manservant Max Von Mayerling (David Thaxton). (Von Mayerling has secrets of his own.)

Desmond takes Joe in to help her shape the screenplay she is writing in the hope of returning in triumph to the silver screen directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Joe finds his attention split between working with Betty on a promising script and the thankless task of tackling Desmond’s messy Salome scenario.

Unfortunately, he falls in love with Betty whose fiancé, Artie (Diego Andres Rodriguez) is a friend of Joe’s.  At the same time, Desmond falls for Joe who is half her age, leading to Joe’s untimely demise. (The film and musical both cleverly begin with the dead Joe telling his tale.)

Sunset Blvd. opens with the just murdered Joe singing “Prologue,” a mordant look at the Hollywood that led to his fate.

Scherzinger as Desmond has two soaring show-stopping numbers—“With One Look” and “New Ways to Dream”—both of which do, indeed, stop the show.  Both Scherzinger and Francis are ardent singer/actors but are working in a dramatic vacuum filled with a chorus of undefined characters who wander about with no other function than to fill the stage.

Grace Hodgett Young’s Betty is feistier than previous interpreters of the role and Diego Andres Rodriguez makes the most of the underwritten Artie.  Both sing beautifully.  David Thaxton, with his beautiful voice, manages to make a real person out of the cartoon figure Max Von Mayerling.

Webber’s score reaches its peak in Norma Desmond’s two arias bemoaning a Hollywood long gone.  The rest of the skillfully composed songs are mostly narrative.

The real stars of the show are the lighting and video designers.  Jack Knowles’ super focused lighting turns the stage of the St. James Theater into a shadowy world allowing the huge screen to dominate the action with its vast close-ups in black and white, the colors of the production.  (DeMille is portrayed as a silhouetted head, twenty feet high.)

By far, the salient feature of this Sunset Blvd. is the videography of Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom.  Portable video cameras are everywhere reporting and commenting on the action.

Soutra Gilmour’s costumes are all black and grey. Scherzinger wears a black slip and nothing else. In fact the only color in Gilmour’s palette—she also did the minimal indications of a set—is the bright red that washes over the stage at the climax of the show.

Fabian Aloise’s choreography is more practical than artistic, moving lines of dancers about the stage to frame the principal characters.

For those who have never seen a more traditional staging of Sunset Blvd. Lloyd’s version at least presents the skeleton of this over-wrought, campy tale of old Hollywood.

Sunset Blvd. (open run)

St. James Theatre, 244 West 44^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.sunsetblvdbroadway.com

Running time: two hours and 45 minutes including one intermission